


Turing Compete

by orphan



Series: Omeletteverse [6]
Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Magic: the Gathering - Freeform, Precursor Emissary Newton Geiszler, Then some angst, ridiculous nerd fluff, then ridiiculous fluff again
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-12
Updated: 2021-01-12
Packaged: 2021-03-17 08:01:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28721811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan/pseuds/orphan
Summary: Newton finds Hermann's old box of Magic cards...
Relationships: Newton Geiszler/Hermann Gottlieb
Series: Omeletteverse [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1974679
Comments: 9
Kudos: 19





	Turing Compete

**Author's Note:**

> ... sometimes you just gotta.

Hermann is halfway through a simulated redesign of the zero-point failsafes when Newton strides in with an absolutely deranged expression and announces, “Hah! We found it!” in a voice so shrill Hermann is surprised it doesn’t summon the swarm.

“Mm?” he says, feigning disinterest, because it’s been nearly three decades and he absolutely knows how this goes.

“Irrefutable proof!” Newton says. He’s holding a somewhat familiar beat-up Hush Puppies box and he lifts it aloft in triumph. He’s in an old Knifehead t-shirt and the jeans he wears when he’s doing something involving crawling—the ones with the rips from actual wear, not tastefully pre-installed by a designer—and he’s covered in dust, hair in disarray in a way that suggests actual disorder, not fashionable artifice.

“Of . . .?” Hermann still does not look up from his work, but if he starts putting it in a state that will allow him to look away, then Newton need not know.

“You,” Newton says. “Irrefutable proof that you are, in fact, the multiverse’s _biggest_ nerd.”

“Oh. My apologies. I wasn’t aware this title was in contention.”

“Hah!” Newton actually says the word, because he is terminally insufferable, and throws himself down in a chair hard enough that it rolls into Hermann’s console with a _thwack_. “We were cleaning the office,” he says, by way of explanation, “because seriously dude that place looks like Julie’s been using it as a nest. Have you _ever_ cleaned it?”

“Shockingly,” Hermann says, “some of us actually have jobs that take priority over ensuring our workspaces spark joy in your sense of aesthetic minimalism.” Newton does not, technically, have an office. He simply moved into Hermann’s and Hermann neither asked him to leave nor arranged an alternative. They don’t yet quite have a tape line, though over time the room’s halves have taken on distinctly different qualities.

“Yeah,” Newton is saying, “except for when we spend like twenty minutes looking for the last USB Kaijute shot through and finally find it growing mould in the bottom of a three-month-old pot of half-drunk tea. That’s, like. A critical issue right there. _But_ , point being, we found _this_.” And he dumps the shoebox on the table.

Hermann recognizes it the moment Newton lifts the lid; it’s been, Lord, over two decades now but the distinctive smell of the old cards still sends him rocketing right back to university. (And, if he’s being honest, many lonely nights during the first War.)

“Magic cards!” Newton is saying. “You, babe, are a _Magic: the Gathering_ freak!”

The box is from Hermann’s pre-Drift days, and obsessively organized for it; several pre-made decks in clear plastic boxes at one end, a little cloth bag of glass token stones, then rows of neatly ordered loose cards at the far end. Sorted by color, then type, then name. He takes out one of the pre-made decks, pulling the cards from their container and shuffling through. That _smell_ , Lord.

“I confess I played a bit in my day, yes,” Hermann says. A massive understatement.

“You never told us!”

“I wasn’t aware you’d be interested.” True enough. Though, more accurately, a significantly younger Hermann had been afraid Newton would find the hobby childish, resulting in either cruel teasing and/or a loss of romantic appeal, depending on where their relationship had been at the time. Present-day Hermann is, of course, not at all concerned with either of these scenarios; Newton is endlessly vociferous in his praise of Hermann’s alleged romantic and sexual attributes, and he almost certainly has instigated this confrontation because—

“Dude! Uh, yeah. We love Magic! Haven’t played in person for, like, decades ‘cause we didn’t know anyone else did. But these cards are, like. Pre-War. We could’ve been kicking your ass for decades if we’d known!”

And Hermann just smiles a secret little smile, flicking through the deck in his hands as he says: “Oh, no. I very much doubt that.”

* * *

So that’s how they start playing _Magic: the Gathering_. Mostly over dinner, either in the lab or the DFAC. They both protest at being “rusty” though it’s almost immediately obvious they’re both lying; Hermann has, indeed, played a non-zero amount of _Magic Online_ these past decades and he suspects Newton may have done the same. He is no slouch at the game, favoring green and black—creatures and swarms, completely unsurprising—and tactically quite brilliant. It’s exhilarating, not just playing again but playing against someone Hermann knows so well, and who knows Hermann in return. They spend a good deal of their time trying to second-guess each other, to move enough out of their comfort zones they can take each other by surprise. It rarely works, but Lord it’s fun. Hermann doesn’t even keep score of who wins. Quite sincerely so; he assumes Newton has been and is legitimately surprised when the man in question confesses this not to be the case. They are both blisteringly competitive people and fight tooth-and-nail when the game is on, but Hermann supposes it a side-effect of the hard-won lessons of age and circumstance that the sentiments don’t persist. Besides, these days they have . . . better methods to distract each other between games.

They also become something of a public novelty, in part, Hermann supposes, for the stereotypical sight of the Shatterdome’s resident “nerds” engaging in such an obviously nerdy hobby. But perhaps more because a lot more people than will admit it are invested in the narrative of their friends-to-rivals-to-partners-to-enemies-to-lovers life story, and rather enjoy the spectacle of them “fighting” in such an obviously low-stakes way. They’re frequently accused of flirting and told to “get a room,” and Pentecost asks them if they’ll be starting a game of _Dungeons & Dragons_ next, in the tone of a man who’s both teasing and who will absolutely be the first to put on his wizard hat and robe, should the answer be yes.

The young Rangers are also all fascinated by the game, and Newton and Hermann end up both teaching them to play and procuring several new boxes of cards to draft from.

“You know,” Newton says, “back in our day we actually had to save up and buy packs one at a time.”

“All right, old man,” says still-technically-Cadet Namani, graduating (officially, this time) next spring. “Why don’t you walk barefoot both ways up the hill in the snow and go cry about it in your giant pile of money?”

“Oof, you wanna let us declare blockers for your attack phase or what?” comes the reply.

Point being, things are going rather well. Hermann is having a jolly good time, and Newton is laughing more and more sincerely since he has since his return, and of course this is when Hermann decides to bring out The Deck, and everything goes to hell.

* * *

Hermann made the original incarnation of The Deck as an undergrad, mostly just to prove he could. It’s been tinkered with since then but the premise remains the same, and is the reason Hermann’s shoebox contained so many small glass tokens.

The deck is, by Magic standards, bizarre. Tournament-legal, sixty cards from every color and no basic land. It’s completely ridiculous and Newton laughs when he first sees it, as most people do.

He’s not laughing the sixth straight time Hermann annihilates him with it.

“The hell, dude? You’re totally cheating!”

“I find that accusation somewhat rich,” Hermann says, “coming from the man attempting to use his drones to spy on my hand.”

“Only because _you_ started cheating first!” Newton splutters as Rodan lands on Hermann’s shoulder, chirping apologetically.

“Here,” says Hermann, laying his cards face-up on the table. “I can also remove my jacket and roll up my sleeves if it would help.”

“Don’t try and distract us with your sexy arms!” comes the, entirely predictable, reply. “Fine. Cheat all you want. We _will_ figure out what you’re doing and we _will_ beat you!”

He doesn’t, though, in part because Hermann isn’t cheating, at least not in the standard definition of the term. Being creative with the rules, yes. But never _cheating_.

Newton tries _everything_ ; blue lockdown and control decks, black zergs, red board-clearing, green pumping, white restriction. Nothing works. For Hermann, the fun wears off after the first day or so, but Newton adamantly will neither allow Hermann to swap decks nor explain what’s going on. He always was both incredibly stubborn and prone to obsessions; traits that are only exacerbated in his . . . new state. And, true. Magic is not attempting to destroy the planet, but Hermann is starting to find the whole thing somewhat concerning Particularly when he feels Newton’s attentions wander while he’s balls-deep in the man’s arse.

“So help me, Newton,” Hermann finally snaps, “but if you are thinking about that _bloody_ deck I am leaving right now and will spend the night at Alice’s.”

A threat that would’ve been absolutely incomprehensible to the Hermann of five years ago, and likely to the Newton, too. Today, though, it forces a mumbled apology, and enough attention that they both make it to satisfactory, if not spectacular, climax.

The next day, of course, Newton has yet another deck to try. It contains not one but _three_ Black Lotuses and Hermann does not even want to think of how much that cost; three actual black Lotus Evora would likely be cheaper, and Hermann merely sighs and reminds himself Newton is ridiculously wealthy and their living expenses are essentially nil. As they’re playing—as Hermann is, yet again, wiping the floor with Newton’s affront to everyone who’s ever had to work for a living—Ms Li comes into the lab with a: “Holy shit is that it? Is that the—” Whereupon she’s immediately shushed by Master Khuran.

“Ssh,” Suresh tells her, sotto voce. “Doc doesn’t want spoilers.”

“Oh,” says Vi. “Right.” Then: “It is one, though, right? A . . . _y’know_ deck.”

“Yeah.”

“Should’ve known Doctor G would’ve— oh crap Doctor G did you . . . Is this _your_ deck?”

“I believe I was the first to document it, yes,” says Hermann, as Newton squints suspiciously at him above his cards.

“That is so badass,” says Vi, completely sincerely, near as Hermann can tell.

Newton’s Lotus deck does not work, of course, and Hermann tells himself he is _much_ too old for the way his heart seizes when he sees the three Black Lotus carelessly tossed into a box with the rest of Newton’s rejected cards. (Hermann slips them each into a little protective plastic sleeve, just because.)

The whole charade goes on for nearly a month, waxing and waning in intensity but never truly abating. Hermann knows he should put a stop to it—it can’t be good for Newton, if nothing else—but a certain level of passivity has always been his curse. For all his reputation as stubborn and cantankerous, the reality is things have to be very bad indeed before Dr. Hermann Gottlieb, PhD, rocks the boat.

Which is somewhat ironic, given they’re sitting in Alice when it happens.

It’s the sort of lazy Wednesday afternoon where nothing much feels urgent and no one much feels like finding it so. Their game has an audience; mostly j-techs loitering on the scaffolding surrounding the hangar bay Alice has settled on as hers, beneath the inert shell of the half-reconstructed Ariel. The drone is asleep, but there’s something about her, about the audience, about Newton’s expression—flat and cold and alien and focused—and suddenly it’s too much, too familiar. It’s just a stupid card game but to Hermann it feels quit suddenly like fingers around his throat, like watching holes open in the sea and a monster tear its way through Tokyo and Hermann _can’t_. He can’t do this, not again. Everyone is watching him, waiting, expecting him to save them, to defeat the monster beneath the skin of his friend and it’s too much for one man to bear, too much for his twisted shoulders and battered heart. Neither spectacle nor a game and suddenly the walls are closing in, despite the vastness of the hangar, and Hermann won’t do it. He _won’t_.

And so he doesn’t.

He stops the machine, and loses the game. On purpose.

He knows Newton knows; they play the game to the end but Newton is darkly silent over it, not crowing in victory like he normally would be. It isn’t until they’re packing up their decks in a silence as frozen as the Throat that Newton looks up and snarls: “Never do that again. We don’t need your _pity_.”

His expression is something Hermann has never seen directed his way before, not even at Shao, and it hits him like a slap. “Newton—!” he starts, but the man is already stood, stalking his way to the edge of the cockpit with a barked: “Alice! Down!”

He’s nearly knocked flat on his arse when Alice slams up her carapace instead.

For a moment, they’re both frozen in shock. Alice has never disobeyed Newton before. Never. And it’s sat there, in the heartbeat before the lights come on, illuminated only by the sickly yellow-green glow of Alice’s brain tank, that it occurs to Hermann just how vulnerable they really are. How trapped.

The though must occur to Newton, too, because he pounds his fist on the inside carapace wall and snarls: “Alice, what the fuck! Open the fuck up!”

“Do not yell at her!” Hermann hears himself snap. “For God’s sake Newton it’s a bloody card game! Just because you—”

“NO. STOP. NO FIGHTING.”

Several weeks ago, Newton commissioned a set of emoji based on Alice’s face from a random person he found online. Alice projects the one for “crying” into the middle of the room, cockpit lurching as she stands up.

“Alice.” Newton’s tone is dark, warning. “Let us out. Right now.”

“NO.”

“Alice!”

“NO.” Alice’s synthetic voice is monotone, but Hermann can _feel_ the petulance behind it.

“I will fucking deactivate you!”

“Newton!” Hermann snaps, or tries to; the cabin abruptly lurches side-to-side as Alice shakes her thorax. Hermann is thankfully still seated and manages to steady both himself and the remains of their card game. Newton is not so lucky, though manages to land on a chair in a pile of flailing limbs and cursing.

“NO FIGHTING,” Alice repeats. “FRIENDS.” Inexplicably, she’s projecting “🐰💙🐰” into the middle of the cockpit as she says it. She’s also moving.

“Alice,” Hermann tries. “Please stop this. Everything is fine but you need to stay on base. And please let us out.” His voice comes out startlingly even, despite his growing panic.

“LEAVE PASS,” Alice says, and projects a chat screen. It’s a conversation between herself and, of all people, Marshal Mori. It reads:

_NEWT HERMANN SAD FIGHTING. TAKE TO ISLAND PLEASE? LEAVE PASS OKAY?_ To which the Marshal has replied in the affirmative, including a “good luck” and a winky face. Honestly.

“For _fuck’s_ sake!” Newton snaps, throwing his hands up and his body back down onto the cockpit’s other lounge.

And Hermann . . . Hermann laughs. He can’t help it, knows it’s hysteria. But what else can he do? “‘Make a sentient ship,’ he said,” he says. “‘It’ll be “cool,”’ he said.” He makes the air quotes for emphasis.

“Fuck you.”

“You have to admit this is at least a little funny.”

“Glad you find the idea of marauding kaiju hilarious all of a sudden, yeah. Super cool, dude, cheers.”

“Oh, for— Newton, she asked permission. _You’re_ the one who’s been encouraging her to think for herself.”

“Yeah, and it’s _our_ fucking head’ll be cut off if she—” He stops himself, lips pressing together and fists balled tightly against his thighs.

“NO CUTTING,” Alice, who of course has been listening, says. “LEAVE PASS. RULES OKAY.” No going near the coast, or cities, or boats, or planes, or other humans at all. Alice is certainly not confined to the Shatterdome; she regularly leaves, both supervised and unsupervised, and they’ve never had any incidents. They’ve removed as much of the Precursor influence from her as they can; Doctor Geiszler has confirmed she harbors no lingering tendency to aggression, and considers Newton and Hermann her family and the PPDC her “hive.” Newton _knows_ all of this. He adores Alice, and is usually her most vociferous advocate. Something is terribly wrong if he’s threatening to shut her down.

“Newton . . .” Hermann starts, and isn’t sure how to continue.

The man in question looks miserable, sprawled out on the far side of the cabin, head bowed and eyes closed, fingers pinching at the bridge of his nose.

“Whatever is going on,” Hermann finally says, “Alice is not at fault.” The kaiju are highly emotional creatures. That Alice reacted to Newton’s upset by, in effect, kidnapping them on a forced romantic getaway is, in retrospect, not entirely surprising.

Newton sighs, dropping his hand. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, you’re right.” Then, to the room: “Alice, baby, sorry for yelling. Daddy was upset, but we shouldn’t’ve taken it out on you.”

“OKAY,” says Alice. “LOVE YOU.” She projects hearts around Newton, and he gives a half-hearted laugh, “popping” the emoji with a finger.

“Love you too, baby.”

“NOW HERMANN.”

“What are you, huh? Some kind of marriage councillor?”

“Up until the last twenty minutes I hadn’t been aware we needed such a thing,” Hermann says. Perhaps slightly too pointedly (and not entirely truthfully). But it’s Newton who’s the one who looks away.

“Sorry,” he says. “Ignore us. We’re being stupid, it’s just— it’s nothing.”

“It may very well be stupid—that’s yet to be established—but it certainly isn’t nothing,” Hermann says. “You’ve been acting very strangely.”

Newton actually flinches at that. “Yeah,” he says. “Sorry. We’re not . . . Not about to, like. Try and blow up the planet again.”

Hermann feels his eyebrows get very high. “I hadn’t thought you were,” he says. “I’m just utterly baffled as to why you’re driving yourself spare over a ruddy card game. I know you’re not this dense; you should’ve worked out how to beat—”

Hermann stops. Hermann stops because Newton is flinching again; curled in on himself, not meeting Hermann’s eye.

The realization, when it comes, is like the tidal wave before a kaiju. “You don’t want to,” Hermann says, voice slow and horror dawning. “You don’t _want_ to work out the trick, don’t want to win.”

“Hermann—”

“This is some kind of— You _want_ to think I will always beat you, that you can never outsmart me.”

“Hermann, please—”

“This isn’t about the ruddy card game at all. It’s about you wanting some kind of— of—”

“Every day!” Newton blurts, too loud and too suddenly. Lurching to his feet like the words are some kind of physical force he’s no longer able to restrain. “Every day, we think, ‘Is this how it starts? Is _this_ it?’ We tell ourself we’re not— that we’re _trying_ , we’re really trying, but you don’t know what it’s like, dude! Don’t know what it was like to— to not _know_. Is something right? Can you trust it, trust yourself, trust the little voice in your head that tells you everything will be okay, and everyone who says otherwise is a stupid jealous rube and what would they know, anyway, we’ll show them! We’ll show them all!” He’s pacing as he says it, getting more and more animated, voice getting louder and more shrill.

“Newton . . .”

“Every day, we think that. Every _fucking_ day. And you know the only thing that stops us going crazy? Crazier? Is knowing that, even if we . . . do that. Again. Then at least—”

“Newton. No.”

“—at least you’ll be there.”

“Newton.”

“And you’ll stop us and—”

“Do _not_! Do not finish that sentence, Newton.” Horror. Horror in his chest and in his gut, roiling like a pit of burning Blue. “Do _not_ put that on me! You cannot. Newton I— I can’t bear it. No one could. I am not your keeper and you’ve no right to force me to be.”

“Easy for you to say.” Newton spits it, voice small and bitter. “ _You_ never tried to— to . . .” He turns away, kicks impotently against the baseboard of the lounge.

Lord. A card game. All this for a _bloody_ card game.

Hermann takes a deep breath, then another. Shares a glance with Alice—or at least her tank—who’s back to listening, quietly. Letting them sort this out. The kaiju are emotional creatures, and intelligent, but their lives have a simplicity to them. They can find humans bafflingly over-complicated and utterly inscrutable, and yet still feel such tremendous love for the tiny aliens that have welcomed them to their worlds, despite all the pain and all the destruction.

Out loud, Hermann says:

“Newton, come here.” He pats the lounge beside him and, after a moment, Newton obeys. He does not sit close enough to touch as so Hermann shuffles over, just a scooch, until their sides are pressed together.

“Newton,” he says, “I am not your keeper. I am your husband. And you made me a promise, do you remember it?” A rash decision and a desperate flight; the end of one life and the birth of another, painful and beautiful and strange.

Newton nods. “Yeah. Yeah, we— We’d tell you. If we were gonna do anything, like. Evil. Again.”

“Your project proposals for k-tech _are_ tremendously thorough.” Hermann, who has literally only just made this connection just now. “But, Newton. That wasn’t so we could ‘stop’ you. It was so you’d never feel you were in a position you had to _start_. Would never feel like you had to do everything alone. You have so many people who love you and care for you, darling.”

“We did before, too,” Newton mutters. “We still . . .” He makes a vague gesture with his hand.

“Spent years pushing us all away,” is how Hermann fills in that blank. “I think you’ll find we’ll be rather more difficult to escape a second time.” A pause. “As Alice just proved.” He bumps their shoulders together for emphasis, and gets a not-quite laugh in response.

“Ye-ee-eah and we are gonna be having a talk about that when we get back, aren’t we?” Newton asks the room. “You can’t just, like. Kidnap people, baby, yeah?”

“MAYBE.”

“Alice—”

“My word,” Hermann says. “Cheeky _and_ disobedient. I wonder where she ever could have possibly picked up those traits?”

“Your shitty interface code corrupted her!” He bumps Hermann back, more playful now and Hermann, of course, reciprocates.

“Oh, yes. Obviously. Must be.”

They end up in a nonsense sort of shoving match on the lounge, which Newton mostly uses as an excuse to bury himself under Hermann’s arm, tucked practically inside Hermann’s coat. The playfulness doesn’t last quite as long as maybe it normally would, and maybe Newton clings a little harder than usual, is a little quieter. Hermann holds him for a while, then:

“Newton . . . if you really do . . . feel. Like that. Perhaps you should . . . see someone.”

Newton snorts, as Hermann knew he would. “What, like. Professionally? Dude, shrinks didn’t even know what to do with _him_ when he was human. The fuck are they gonna do with us?”

“Consider it, at least? If you feel it truly useless then at least you will have established as much empirically.”

“Guilting us with the scientific method, huh?” Then, before Hermann can give an answer: “We’ll think about it. Maybe.”

“CHEEKY,” comes Alice’s immediate reply.

* * *

Two days later, Hermann comes home to find Newton sprawled out on their sofa, reading from a very familiar old folder.

“‘Computational Universality in _Magic: the Gathering,_ ’” he quotes, as Hermann enters. “By, oh look at that. One Hermann Gottlieb, et al. Found this on the shelf under your old man shoebox, when we went back to look. And check this out: ‘The core of this paper is the construction of a universal Turing machine embedded into a game of _Magic: The Gathering_.’ More importantly, ‘we can arrange for the victor of the game to be determined by the halting behavior of the Turing machine. We choose to encode halting as making Alice win the game.’ Nice Player One name, by the way.”

It’s a computer science standard—Alice and Bob and Eve—but Hermann doesn’t say as much, just comes to sit next to Newton on the sofa.

“And here,” Newton is saying, “we thought we’d read _every_ paper you’d ever published.”

“Not undergraduate work, it seems,” Hermann says, not at all bothering to hide his smirk.

“Totally remiss of us.”

“Mm.”

“This is your stupid deck. You encoded a freaking invincible computer program into a Magic game, you enormous fucking nerd.”

“I _was_ rather proud of it.”

“As evidenced by the fact you’ve been lugging it around with you for, like. Thirty years. And improving on it.”

“The original construction _was_ a little obvious.”

“No shit. So you just . . . re-encoded it as a fucking stealth hack.”

“It is completely tournament legal.”

“You’ve played it, have you?”

“My _Magic Online_ record is utterly impeccable.” Actually, he’d eventually been banned from certain aspects of the game’s tournament and microtransaction economy, in return for automatic access to every released card set and the odd spot of research work for Wizards on the side.

“Every day we wake up in awe of how much of a nerd you are, thinking, ‘He couldn’t possibly get nerdier, surely.’ And yet, you continue to astound and delight us. This marriage shit is the bomb, seriously.” He’s both so ridiculous and so ridiculously sincere that Hermann kisses him; solid and warm and firm beneath the cotton of his t-shirt, and he presses himself unselfconsciously against Hermann’s side, tangling his stocky legs around Hermann’s good one.

“All that time,” he says, when they break apart, “in the War, when we thought you were hiding in your room drinking tea and going to bed at six p.m., you were really thinking of new ways to scam people in _Magic: the Gathering_ tee-em.”

“Is your memory going bad in your old age? I strongly recall that, during the War, I was rather more in the habit of staying awake for three days straight attempting to thwart our adversaries.”

“With math.”

“With maths, yes.”

“When you could’ve been, like, making millions doing your weird Turing shit with poker, instead.”

“Firstly, that would _hardly_ have benefited me, had the Anteverse succeeded in annihilating all places to spend such ill-gotten gains and, secondly and more importantly, _I_ didn’t need to make millions. I married _you_ , Mister Three-Black-Lotuses.”

“That’s _Doctor_ Three Black _Loti_ , thank you.”

“Perhaps next time I’m in town I should just withdraw as much cash as the bank will give me and we can have a bonfire on the roof.”

“Pretty sure burning money is a crime, dude. Plus polymer smoke can’t be good for the environment.”

“You can pay for my bail with the remains of our bank account.”

“I don’t know they let felons post other felons’ bail. Plus we can’t _both_ be criminals; one of us has to be the straight guy, it’s the rules.”

“Newton, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but _neither_ of us are ‘the straight guy.’ Legally, in fact. As recognized under the _Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch_.” He wriggles Newton’s wedding ring for emphasis as he says it; fingers tangling together, palms pressing close.

“Two straight dudes could get gay married,” Newton immediately retorts. “No law saying they couldn’t.”

“A premise of which I’m sure has been explored in _many_ terrible so-called ‘comedy’ films.”

“And fanfic.” Newton pauses. “Though generally that turns out, like. ‘Surprise! We weren’t actually straight after all!’ Then buttsex.”

“You’ve indulged in a number of these pieces of literature, I take it?”

“Hey. We had to do _something_ while you were busy rebuffing our advances in order to cheat at Magic.”

“Still not cheating. And is that what they were supposed to be? You deafening me with your terrible music and ridiculing my life’s work?”

“Hermann, babe. Your insistence on utter silence in the lab is totally cool and normal and fine, and your life’s work saved the planet at least half a time maybe. Can we get to the buttsex now?”

“Oh,” says Hermann, completely deadpan. “What a surprise. It seems I am not straight after all.”

And Newton grins, and: “Wow, dude. Me neither.”

* * *

Of course, that’s not the end of it.

The end of it comes roughly a week later, with:

“All right. One more game.”

“Newton . . .”

“Last one, we promise. If we lose, pinky swear we will never bug you about this again.”

It’s Friday afternoon and the lab is all-but deserted. Newton is dressed suspiciously well for the occasion, brandishing two deck boxes, one of which he holds out to Hermann, wriggling it invitingly.

“I think I am very thoroughly over this game,” Hermann grouses, though takes the proffered deck.

“Hah!” says Newton, articulate as ever, as he grabs the back of Hermann’s chair and wheels him physically over to a relatively clear workbench. (Hermann allows this, because it’s Newton and because, nowadays, it’s also something only Newton would ever have the balls to try. It likely wouldn’t even occur to him why he perhaps _shouldn’t_ , at least not unless someone else pointed it out.)

So they play. Newton’s new deck, on the face of it, seems a fairly standard blue-black control-removal deck. He has absolutely no poker face whatsoever, however, and keeps grinning at Hermann over the top of his cards. The affect of childish excitement is, somehow, in no way ruined by the grey that’s started creeping into his beard, and Hermann is once again struck with just how irrationally besotted he is with this disastrous little goblin of a man.

It takes several turns to draw the right cards to set up the machine, as it always does, and it occurs to Hermann, as he lays the last piece down, they’re in some sort of stalemate. Newton is _waiting_ for this; knees jiggling eagerly, eyes blazingly blue. And Hermann? Well. How can Hermann deny him?

He starts the machine. And everything crumbles.

* * *

“Memory exhaustion,” Hermann concludes, when all is said and done. “Very good.”

“We read the Wikipedia page.” It’s actually amazing Newton can still physically form words, given the size of his grin.

“And my original paper.” It’d been one of undergrad Hermann’s originally proposed deck counters. He’d never quite figured out the card combination to make it work, but: “A halt-state involving a forced, infinite card draw.” Resulting in eventually having to draw against an empty deck. An instant loss, under the rules of _Magic: the Gathering_.

“Mm,” says Newton, affecting nonchalance. “Was it? Must’ve skipped over that part.” _We always do our best work together,_ Hermann sees, in press of his grin and softening of his eyes.

“Well, congratulations regardless. Now you’ll have to excuse me while I never play this godawful game ever again.” This is almost certainly a lie, longer-term. But for the next few years? Absolutely. Hermann is _done_.

“Aw, see. And here we were prepared for you to be all, like, crushed over your inevitible loss. We put on our special super-absorbent crying shoulder pads and everything.”

“How considerate.”

“Aa-aa-and nailed us a chef’s table at Caprice.”

“Oh. _Well_ then.” That is . . . a _very_ fancy restaurant.

“Dude is, like, _way_ into Magic, as it turns out,” adds Newton. “So we traded him our Black Loti for it. You might have to sign them, though. He was super stoked when I told him who you were and what you did.”

“Ah, yes. I’m sure meeting me is the draw, _not_ the two million dollars’ worth of cardboard you just handed him.” But he stands, brushing down his crumpled slacks self-consciously. Not so bad since removing all the chalkboards, but still dreadfully dowdy next to Newton. And to such an illustrious establishment . . . Perhaps he should get changed, first?

“You look amazing, dude,” is Newton’s opinion, totally unsurprisingly. “And it’s not like we bought Alpha prints. We’re not _made_ of money.” A pause. “Any more.” His hand is warm on the small of Hermann’s back, not quite pushing him out the door.

Hermann goes, well aware of the mess of cards they’re leaving behind. Such painstakingly crafted decks, left splayed out and commingled and forgotten. A more poetic man would make something of that, he thinks.

Hermann, of course, is not a poetic man. So he simply links his free arm with Newton’s, and prepares to enjoy his night.

And then, of course, as they’re almost through the lab door, Newton says:

“So. D&D?”

**Author's Note:**

> So, yes; the premise of this fic is based on a [very real paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09828), though I've taken _heavy_ license with how the game [actually plays](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHimZMMVbx8). All apologies to the original authors, but when I saw this I just... had to.


End file.
